Thursday, February 20, 2014

From ‘Heights of Madness. One woman's journey in pursuit of a secret war’ by Myra MacDonald

“India is not an
underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of
decay”

-Shashi Tharoor in The
Great Indian Novel

“This world was more
wonderful for than I had ever known before.

And I seemed to grow
greater myself from the mere fact of having seen it. Having once seen that, how
could I ever be little again?”

-British explorer Francis Younghusband on the Karakoram

I thought of Vikram Singh, of how I had gone to see him
seeking the sordid drama of war and had come away instead thinking of the
ghosts he talked about with quiet dignity. I remembered a poem I had read many
years before by D. H. Lawrence about how he had seen a snake in Sicily and
foolishly failing to respect its beauty and its power, chased it away. “And I
have something to expiate”, he wrote. “A pettiness”.

Crows, considered auspicious in Hindu mythology, are
believed to be the only birds present at Creation. They are the carriers of
omens, seers of the future. They know the secrets of immortality and of hell.
When the Siachen war started, they were still there, for soldiers told me that
the only living creature they saw during their long, lonely months were crows.

This once undiscovered place had acquired the dejection of
tourist towns that are unsure how to behave when the tourists are not there. It
felt lonely and abandoned. Youths in cheap jackets and jeans wandered aimlessly
in small groups, occasionally stopping to try to speak to me with an irritating
sense of entitlement.

The helicopter was so tiny that is seemed surprised to be in
the air …..